Texas City Refinery Research Articles

The Role of the Butterfly Effect in Oil and Gas and Environmental Impact

This study is devoted to analyzing the influence of the butterfly effect on accidents in the oil and gas industry and their consequences for the environment. The butterfly effect, which implies that small changes in a system can lead to significant and unpredictable consequences, plays a key role in the occurrence of catastrophic events in the industry. The study analyzes six major accidents, namely Exxon Valdez (1989), Deepwater Horizon (2010), Piper Alpha (1988), Prestige (2002), Kuwaiti Oil Fires (1991), and BP Texas City Refinery (2005). The cause-and-effect relationships leading to the accidents are identified and their environmental impacts, including water and soil contamination, marine animal mortality, biodiversity decline, and long-term economic losses are assessed. The results show that many accidents could have been prevented with stricter safety standards and the use of modern monitoring and warning technologies. Recommendations include strengthening international standards, implementing automated warning systems, improving personnel skills and creating a safety culture. This study highlights the need to further improve measures to prevent accidents and minimize their environmental impact, and to direct future research towards the development of new monitoring and prevention technologies and methods.

The Sociotechnical Construction of Risks, and Principles of the Proactive Approach to Safety

This proposal presents the Sociotechnical Construction of Risks, Ergonomics, and the two principles of the Proactive Approach to Safety, Risks, and Emergencies, the Structured Sociotechnical Approach and Dynamics of Proactive Safety intending to complement traditional risk assessments, and prevent and Mitigating Major and Fatal Negative Events, the in organizations such as cases of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the nuclear accident in Fukushima, the Texas City Refinery and the explosion in the Port of Beirut, among others. To propose these two principles, case studies were developed at Fiocruz, and in organizations, sectors, and activities, a bibliographic review on theses, dissertations, reports from regulatory bodies, books, scientific articles, and media articles, on major and fatal negative events, and ergonomics, socio-technical approach, and resilience engineering. A tragedy prevention course was created, with four free online consultation modules, based on cases of major negative events. These principles redirect the focus from human error to Focus on the Structured Sociotechnical System and Focus on the Dynamics of Proactive Safety. It is proposed that these two principles can provide us with bases for analysis, to prevent and minimize Major and Fatal Negative Events, and are a complement to traditional risk assessments.

Predicting major hazard accidents by monitoring their barrier systems: A validation in retrospective

OCI Nitrogen, one of Europe’s largest fertilizer producers, is investigating the extent to which it is possible to take targeted measures at an early stage and stop the development of major hazard accident processes. An innovative model has been developed and recently explained and elaborated in a number of publications. This current paper contains a validation of the model by looking at the BP Texas City incident in 2005. The bowtie metaphor is used to visually present the BP Texas City refinery incident, showing the barrier system from different perspectives. Not only is the barrier system looked at from its trustworthiness on the day of the incident but also from the perspective of the control room operator, and from a design to current standards of best practice. The risk reductions of these different views are calculated and compared to their original design. In addition, evidence and findings from the investigations have been categorized as flaws and allocated to nine organizational factors. These flaws may affect the barrier system’s quality or trustworthiness, or may act as ‘accident pathogens’ (see also Reason, 1990) creating latent, dangerous conditions. This paper sheds new light on the monitoring of accident processes and the barrier management to control them, and demonstrates that the BP Texas City refinery incident could have been foreseen using preventive barrier indicators and monitoring organizational factors.

Investigating the implementation of the safety-diagnosability principle to support defence-in-depth in the nuclear industry: A Fukushima Daiichi accident case study

‘Defence in depth’ (DID) is a fundamental safety principle applied in several industries, including nuclear. The key is to protect safety critical systems by employing multiple layers of protection, i.e. barriers. The principle states that one single barrier, regardless of how reliable, is insufficient to ensure acceptable safety performance. Obviously then, as the reliability of the layers are associated with the risk of hazardous events, a main safety management activity should be to monitor barrier conditions and performance. However, as experienced in the past, there could be situations where such monitoring is unsatisfactory, challenging the usefulness of the DID. One example, taken from the oil and gas industry, is the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion, where multiple layers of protection failed, resulting in an accident caused by operators with poor situational awareness. Motivated by this assumed weakness, a new principle called the ‘Safety diagnosability principle’ (SDP) has been suggested for use in the oil and gas industry, in combination with the DID principle. The SDP requires that, for DID to function as intended, any degradation of barriers must be diagnosable and reported. The link to DID makes it also relevant to other industries. In this article, we consider the principle for the nuclear industry. The objective of the article is to clarify the benefits, different ways of implementation, and the potential for using SDP in conjunction with DID in the nuclear industry. To assess the value added, we evaluate the principle against different criteria characterising usefulness. Overall, we find the principle attractive, as the detection and diagnosis of safety–critical events or failures are important for safety management. Having such information strengthens the DID. On the other side, it can also be claimed that acquiring such information is already an implicit part of DID. If so, the SDP adds limited value beyond compliance, i.e. making sure the information is acceptable. We conclude that particularly the relevancy, but also the achievability, related to the use of the SPD, do not point in favour of the principle. A discussion on the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident strengthens our conclusions. The case study indicates that the SDP would not have made the outcome very different. However, as a standalone principle, it might be of greater value. Having reliable information about barrier performance is clearly important to safety management.

On the use of criteria based on the SMART acronym to assess quality of performance indicators for safety management in process industries

Management of safety, and barriers in particular, includes using information expressing performance, i.e. use of safety performance indicators. For this information to be useful, the indicators should demonstrate adequate quality. In other words, they should satisfy some predefined set of quality criteria. Without showing adequate quality, the indicators are generally unable to provide sufficient support for barrier management, which could result in poor decisions. In this article, the use of the SMART criteria is considered to assess the quality of safety performance indicators in process industries. SMART being an acronym for ‘specificity’, ‘measurability’ or ‘manageability’, ‘achievability’, ‘relevancy’ and ‘time-based’, covering five key aspects and criteria for assessing the quality of an indicator. A discussion on whether the indicators are able to demonstrate adequate quality by satisfying these criteria has been conducted. The finding is that all of the SMART criteria should be satisfied for a safety performance indicator to demonstrate acceptable quality and to be regarded as useful to support barrier management decision-making. However, it has also been observed that including the ‘M’ criterion in the assessment of quality is not needed. When all the other criteria are satisfied there is no way the conclusions could be misleading as a result of measurability or manageability aspects. Hence, for safety performance indicator quality, only four of the criteria are assessed and suggested for such situations to shorten the acronym to ‘STAR’. A key safety indicator used in downstream process facilities, i.e. ‘dangerous fluid overfilling events’, motivated from the 2005 Texas City refinery accident, is used to illustrate the situation. The indicator is also applied to another incident, the Buncefield oil storage depot's accident in 2005, to provide a broader context for using it. The findings in this article could also be applied beyond the context studied. This means that, despite focusing on safety indicators in the process industries, the findings are considered as relevant and applicable to other types of performance indicators and to other energy industries.

Beyond human error: An empirical study of the safety Model 1 and Model 2 approaches for predicting workers’ behaviors and outcomes with procedures

Procedures serve an important role as safety barriers in industries and can assist workers in executing tasks. However, several notable incidents have occurred, such as the Texas City Refinery and Piper Alpha disasters, where the lack of compliance with procedures was a contributing cause. Historically, much of the research and practice has focused on better controlling the workers' behaviors and increasing compliance through strict adherence to written procedures. Dekker (2003) refers to this as a Model 1 approach and compares it to a Model 2 approach where procedures are designed to be resources or tools to support workers' actions while performing a task. While the Model 1 posits that individual-level variables are more predictive of important outcomes, Model 2 suggests that individual and system-level variables are both important. The current empirical study (N = 174) sought to examine both system- and individual-level variables associated with behaviors and outcomes in procedural systems to support the need to include Model 2 in procedural systems research and practice. Results indicated that attitudinal individual-level variables regarding procedure utility and compliance uniquely predicted relevant criteria (deviations, use, and incident-near-miss rates) in multiple regression models. Additionally, we found that system-level variables did improve two out of three models, and procedure quality perceptions were a significant system-level predictor in all of the full regression models. These results illustrate the importance of moving away from an exclusive Model 1 approach to safety and procedures in high-risk, industrial organizations.

Identifying safety indicators for safety performance measurement using a system engineering approach

The paper presents a method for the development of safety indicators for a process industry application based on a system engineering perspective. Traditional approaches use probabilistic risk assessment or linear accident models which assume that accidents are linear chains of events and do not consider complex systemic factors and interactions. After BP's Texas City refinery incident, the investigation committee reported that BP had a false sense of safety performance due to providing more focus on managing personal safety rather than process safety. System engineering concepts may help the process industry to operate their activities without any severe accidents by establishing a better safety management system. This paper adopts the STAMP (System-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes) accident causation model to identify system specific indicators and also describes the proposed method with the help of a simple process industry application which is an LNG ship to ship transfer process. It compares the developed method with other methods for practical case applications. The first step of the present method is to establish the safety control structure, then safety performance indicators are identified. Further work is necessary to investigate to what degree these STAMP based indicators are complementary to indicators developed by other methods.

Safety performance indicators : a questioning diversity

Safety performance evaluation is an important issue of industrial risk management. If this statement is well accepted by the community, how to evaluate this performance does not meet consensus. The traditional incident-based approach has been shaken in 2007, after the Texas City refinery explosion. Accident report has pointed out confusion between personal safety and process safety, and between lagging and lagging indicators. Large number of thoughts and discussions has emerged regarding the use of safety performance indicators to measure level of risk. An indicator can be defined as a measurement, qualitative or quantitative, which provides information, in a specific objective of interpretation, in a particular context, for a specific actor. Almost 10 years after the Texas City accident, literature is now enriched with many proposals of set of indicators, emerging from scientific articles and industrial guidelines. Faced with this diversity of sources and management tools, we highlight the following question. What are the criteria for comparison, differentiation, and selection of these tools? Our study is based on an in-depth analytical review of the literature. As a result, several criteria seem to emerge: models used to design indicators, object of study, objectives of interpretation, terms of implementation and revision, actors affected by the outcome, and terms to validate the scientific relevance and operational feasibility. Multiplication of tools gradually improves the monitoring and driving of safety. However, our study shows that several criteria for indicators still need to be discussed, both theoretically and practically.

Roles of contractors in process safety

Process safety starts at the conceptual phase and continues throughout the entire life cycle of an asset. From process selection to de-commissioning, various process safety elements govern the safety and reliability of the total system. Contractors play a crucial role in project execution including detailed design, technology selection, plant layout, commissioning, start-up, and further expansion, modification and maintenance activities. The interface/interaction of the contractor with the operator/owner often defines the importance of process safety throughout this life cycle. Undoubtedly, these are the most critical phases of a plant life cycle which could trigger an unexpected or uncontrolled situation leading to a catastrophic incident. This paper discusses the impact of the contractors’ role during major process safety events including the Phillips explosion in Pasadena (1989), Sonat vessel failure (1998), Texas City Refinery explosion (2005), T2 Laboratories explosion (2007) and a few others. Lessons from past incidents are highlighted and an in-depth analysis is conducted to identify essential process safety components for different groups of contractors and for the different phases of projects. Different aspects of process safety functional elements are presented and discussed for both greenfield and brownfield projects. A Comprehensive understanding of process safety and risk management is required by all levels of contractors to ensure risk-based decision making and hazard mitigation. Besides the process safety expertise needed by the contractors, the necessity of having a consistent and harmonized interaction between the operators/owners and the contractors is also emphasized.

Comparison of prescriptive and performance-based regulatory regimes in the U.S.A and the U.K.

Every major industrial accident such as Piper Alpha disaster, Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, BP Texas City Refinery led to the development of new regulations. After the BP Deepwater Horizon accident, several investigation committees recommended to reexamine the United States' existing regulatory approaches by integrating more sophisticated risk assessment and risk management practices. It has been observed that this type of reactive changes in regulation sometimes give more focus on the causes of a particular accident rather than considering possible future hazards unrelated to that particular accident. There are primarily two approaches of the offshore oil/gas industry's regulatory regime; while the United States' regulatory system is the more prescriptive-based, the United Kingdom's approach is performance-based. The National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Accident recommended changing U.S. regulatory regime to a proactive, risk-based approach which could be similar to the “Safety Case” approach of the North Sea. The “Safety Case” approach of the U.K. is considered successful in minimizing accidents in the North Sea region. The objective of this study is to perform an evaluation and comparison between the United States' prescriptive-based regulatory approaches and the United Kingdom's performance-based regulatory approaches to understand their advantages and disadvantages. Then, this study presents an analysis of major accident histories under both regulatory regimes and discusses their effectiveness in reducing accidents. The study has found that there are both advantages and disadvantages in both the regulatory regimes and with available data, it is difficult to conclude with certainty that one regulatory regime is better than the other.

Learning from Accidents – Reporting is not Enough

The fire and explosion at the Nypro Works, Flixborough, UK in 1974 led to the setting up of a court of inquiry which reported in 1975. In the closing paragraphs of the report (Department of Employment, 1975) various lessons are listed as well as issues to be referred to other bodies. Two aspects are worth highlighting, as they have to a certain extent been lost in the mists of time. Firstly, “that the management structure should be so organised that the feedback from the bottom to the top should be effective.” This is not only to ensure that instructions are effectively carried out, but also that those responsible for certain tasks are competent, that top management has a clear understanding of the responsibilities and demands placed on individuals including the potential for overloading. The second issue which was raised, but referred to other bodies for urgent consideration, is that of the siting of offices, laboratories and the like well removed from hazardous plants and the construction of control rooms on block-house principles. This was then addressed further in their 2nd report to the UK’s Health and Safety Commission by the Advisory Committee on Major Hazards (HSC, 1979) On 23 March 2005 an explosion occurred at BP America’s Texas City refinery killing 15 workers and injuring 170 others. All of the fatalities occurred in a temporary office container located adjacent to the ISOM-plant, but not associate with the start-up operations of this plant. The lessons learned and conclusions drawn from the various investigations regarding the location of temporary buildings as well as the feedback within the management structure bear stark similarities to those of thirty years before. The fact that the analogy between the vulnerable buildings listed in the Flixborough report and the temporary buildings for contractors had not been drawn is an indicator of the limits of the learning achieved.This is not an isolated case, but has been repeated many fold. The chemical process world needs to make learning the lessons, i.e. taking action where appropriate, a fundamental aspect of process safety in the coming years.This paper shows examples of the failure to learn or limits of learning achieved in the past. It raises the need to establish learning organisations not only in the chemical processing industry, but also within public authorities and academia. It confirms the requirement that learning from accidents be firmly anchored in the safety management system and that leadership and corporate governance are essential to achieving this and preventing as far as possible the disasters of the past being repeated (be it in a modified form) in the future.

The evolution of process safety standards and legislation following landmark events-what have we learnt?

While modern process safety can be dated back to E.I. duPont in the early 1800s with the building of black powder plants including separation distances, and blast zones, the management of process safety has come a long way. Despite this, however, we have continued to see many catastrophic incidents occur, across a range of industries. There have been significant learning opportunities from the catastrophes, but are we actually applying the learnings? Exploring the past 40 years history shows a number of landmark process safety events. These events have not only changed our state of knowledge for managing process safety but have also resulted in standards and legislative change in multiple jurisdictions. This article explores the significant learnings that came out of the various landmark process safety events and the impact these changes have had on how process safety is managed today. Incidents considered as case studies in this article include the following: Flixborough UK (1974), Seveso Italy (1976), Bhopal India (1984), Piper Alpha UK (1988), Longford Australia (1998), Texas City Refinery USA (2005), Montara Australia (2009), Macondo USA (2010), and Pike River New Zealand (2010). © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 35: 165–170, 2016

Coupling of advanced techniques for dynamic risk management

Identification and assessment of hazards and risks in the activities of the process industry are of paramount importance for the prevention of major accidents. Although several techniques of HAZard Identification (HAZID) and quantified risk analysis have often been proved effective in the industry, they generally lack the dynamic dimension of risk management. In other words, they lack the ability to learn from new risk notions, experience and early warnings. When carrying out HAZID and risk assessment, there is the need to know how to deal with atypical accident scenarios as soon as their emergence is demonstrated. The related risk needs to be addressed in an ever-changing environment. In fact, what is not identified or assessed cannot be prevented or mitigated and latent risk is more dangerous than recognized one due to the relative lack of preparedness. This study proposes a dynamic approach to risk by coupling an advanced technique for hazard identification to an innovative method for risk assessment: the Dynamic procedure for atypical scenarios identification (DyPASI) and the Dynamic risk assessment (DRA) method. DyPASI was developed within the EC project iNTeg-Risk. This technique aims to complete and update HAZID. Atypical accident scenarios, which by definition are deviating from normal expectations of unwanted events or worst case reference scenarios, are identified through a systematic screening of related emerging risk notions. The DRA method aims to estimate the updated expected frequency of accident scenarios by means of Bayesian inference. Real time abnormal situations or incident data are used as new information to update the failure probabilities of the system safety barriers, which necessarily affect the overall scenario frequencies and the related risk profile. The BP Texas City refinery accident, that occurred on 23 March 2005, was considered as a case study. The results obtained from the application of the dynamic risk approach show that the accident should have been expected and its occurrence probability could have been reduced through this approach. The results highlight the need of safety culture and decision-making processes capable of dealing dynamically with emerging and increasing risk issues.

Accident prevention approach throughout process design life cycle

The accident rate in the chemical process industry (CPI) has not been decreasing although majority of accident causes have been identified and could have been prevented by using existing knowledge. These recurring accidents show that the existing knowledge has not been used effectively. In this paper, accident knowledge learned from earlier accident analyses are utilized to predict the common design errors during chemical plant design. An accident prevention approach throughout process design life cycle is proposed for a safer design consideration where designers are guided to identify common design errors, accident contributors and critical points to look for. The accident prevention approach has been applied to analyze the BP Texas City Refinery Explosion and Fire tragedy.

The people side of process safety

During the past decade, the oil and gas industry has experienced frequent disasters. As evidenced by the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil well disaster, safety excellence is yet to be achieved. In response to these events, various investigations have led to the publication of recommendations, both for the involved parties and for the wider industry. A key recommendation from the Texas City Refinery disaster highlighted the need to distinguish carefully between process safety and personal safety, and to manage these two types of safety differently (Hopkins, 2011). While it is acknowledged that personal safety systems are far from the silver bullet for managing risk, from the events of the past decade, it is clear that processes and systems are only as good as the people who run them and that there is a need to integrate person and process based safety approaches. We need to consider how the person component interacts with the processes for safety and the ultimate role that individuals and groups within organisations play in the success of our safety interventions. If a process safety initiative is conceptualised similarly to other organisational interventions, people play a significant role in determining the success of a process safety initiative. To illustrate this concept, this presentation demonstrates how applying key concepts from the disciplines of organisational psychology (e.g. change management), social psychology (e.g. team dynamics), and cognitive psychology (e.g. thinking patterns and habits) can make process safety initiatives more effective.

Texas City refinery accident: Case study in breakdown of defense-in-depth and violation of the safety–diagnosability principle in design

In 2005 an explosion rocked the BP Texas City refinery, killing 15 people and injuring 180. The company incurred direct and indirect financial losses on the order of billions of dollars for victims’ compensation as well as significant property damage and loss of production. The internal BP accident investigation and the Chemical Safety Board investigation identified a number of factors that contributed to the accident. In this work, we first examine the accident pathogens or lurking adverse conditions at the refinery prior to the accident. We then analyze the sequence of events that led to the explosion, and we highlight some of the provisions for the implementation of defense-in-depth and their failures. Next we identify a fundamental failure mechanism in this accident, namely the absence of observability or ability to diagnose hazardous states in the operation of the refinery, in particular within the raffinate splitter tower and the blowdown drum of the isomerization unit. We propose a general safety–diagnosability principle for supporting accident prevention, which requires that all safety-degrading events or states that defense-in-depth is meant to protect against be diagnosable, and that breaches of safety barriers be unambiguously monitored and reported. The safety–diagnosability principle supports the development of a “living” or online quantitative risk assessment, which in turn can help re-order risk priorities in real time based on emerging hazards, and re-allocate defensive resources. We argue that the safety–diagnosability principle is an essential ingredient for improving operators’ situation awareness. Violation of the safety–diagnosability principle translates into a shrinking of the time window available for operators to understand an unfolding hazardous situation and intervene to abate it. Compliance with this new safety principle provides one way to improve operators’ sensemaking and situation awareness and decrease the conditional probability that an accident will occur following an adverse initiating event. We suggest that defense-in-depth be augmented with this principle, without which it can degenerate into an ineffective defense-blind safety strategy.

Maintenance-related major accidents: Classification of causes and case study

The potential for major accidents is inherent in most industries that handle or store hazardous substances, for e.g. the hydrocarbon and chemical process industries. Several major accidents have been experienced over the past three decades. Flixborough Disaster (1974), Seveso Disaster (1976), Alexander Kielland Disaster (1980), Bhopal Gas Tragedy (1984), Sandoz Chemical Spill (1986), Piper Alpha Disaster (1988), Philips 66 Disaster (1989), Esso Longford Gas Explosion (1998), Texas City Refinery Explosion (2005), and most recently the Macondo Blowout (2010) are a few examples of accidents with devastating consequences.Causes are being exposed over time, but in recent years maintenance influence tends to be given less attention. However, given that some major accidents are maintenance-related, we intend to concentrate on classifying them to give a better insight into the underlying and contributing causes.High degree of technological and organizational complexity are attributes of these industries, and in order to control the risk, it is common to deploy multiple and independent safety barriers whose integrity cannot be maintained without adequate level of maintenance. However, maintenance may have a negative effect on barrier performance if the execution is incorrect, insufficient, delayed, or excessive. Maintenance can also be the triggering event.The objectives of this article are: (1) To investigate how maintenance impacts the occurrence of major accidents, and (2) To develop classification schemes for causes of maintenance-related major accidents.The paper builds primarily on model-based and empirical approaches, the latter being applied to reports on accident investigation and analysis. Based on this, the Work and Accident Process (WAP) classification scheme was proposed in the paper.

Dynamic simulation of the BP Texas City refinery accident

The paper investigates the causes and simulates the dynamics of the events that led to the catastrophic explosion on March 23, 2005 at the British Petroleum (BP) refinery in Texas City (USA) where 15 people died and 180 were injured.The paper follows the timeline of the accident, investigates the premises that characterized its phenomenology, and performs a critical analysis to fill the gaps that can be found in the scientific literature concerning the accident. In particular, a commercial dynamic process simulator (UNISIM) was adopted and integrated with ad hoc models to explain the column flooding and overfilling, the opening of the relief valves, and the flow of a two-phase mixture into the pipe connected to the blowdown system. The main findings are: (1) that the mass balance and the liquid thermal expansion cannot explain the complete flooding and overflow of the isomerization column; (2) the vapor cap used to explain the column overflow is unrealistic in our opinion; (3) the overflow can be explained by the partial vaporization of the feed stream after 1:00 PM and the consequent dispersion of vapor bubbles into the liquid holdup above the feed tray. In particular, tray holes smaller than 8 mm could cause the overflow; (4) there is a significant change in the thermodynamic conditions of the mixture emitted by the column head (temperature, pressure, vapor/liquid fractions) along the 270 m pipeline that connects the relief valves to the blowdown system; (5) the HEM model, together with the initial conditions we applied cannot explain the blowdown drum filling and release, therefore further studies are necessary.

SULFUR DIOXIDE AND VOLATILE ORGANIC COMPOUND EXPOSURE TO A COMMUNITY IN TEXAS CITY, TEXAS EVALUATED USING AERMOD AND EMPIRICAL MONITORING DATA

According to emissions data reported to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), the BP Products North America Inc. (BP) Texas City Refinery is the worst polluter of all the industries in Texas City and is one of the worst polluting refineries in the country. The facility has reported releasing substantial emissions of Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). Air dispersion modeling of the emissions from the facility can be used to assess contamination in the community surrounding the BP Texas City Refinery. In the present study, air dispersion modeling of SO2 and VOCs was performed using AERMOD, the EPA-preferred regulatory dispersion model, to determine the impact of BP’s contribution to local air pollution on residents of Texas City and La Marque. SO2 emissions reported to be released by the facility were modeled using AERMOD and it was determined that geographical locations inside this plume experienced ambient air concentrations of SO2 meeting or exceeding 50 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m3) in 2009 and 2010. Data collected by six active SO2 air monitors located in Texas City support the air dispersion modeling results. Additional modeling was conducted for VOCs emitted by the facility in 2010. The AERMOD analysis of SO2 concentrations in and around the BP facility produced results consistent with data collected by the air monitoring network in Texas City. This confirms the accuracy of AERMOD’s estimations and its reliability as an emissions modeling tool. VOC concentrations available for analysis from the air monitoring network in Texas City are extremely limited in terms of the quantity of VOCs sampled for. This evidence affirms the ability of AERMOD to demonstrate comprehensive contaminant impacts that surpass the ability of the current air monitoring network.

Evolution of the American Petroleum Institute ANSI standard for fatigue risk management systems in the refining and petrochemical industry

During the past five years, a broad international consensus has emerged in many 24/7 industries regarding the optimal way to manage and reduce employee fatigue risk: via a process called a fatigue risk management system (FRMS). Government regulatory agencies, industry associations and many businesses with 24/7 operations have recently incorporated an FRMS into their regulations, industry standards, and their corporate policies. The development of the American Petroleum Institute (API) and American National Standards Institute's (ANSI) standard for FRMSs in the refining and petrochemical industries began after the US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) released its report on the 2005 Texas City Refinery explosion. The CSB report highlighted concerns about some of the operators on duty being on their 30th consecutive 12-hour shift. API decided to take a proactive approach and develop an industry standard by forming a committee of industry managers from many of the oil companies, union representatives, industry associations and scientific experts in circadian sleep physiology and fatigue in shiftwork operations. During the course of extensive consultations during a two year period, a clear consensus emerged that hours of service rules would be inadequate by themselves. A clear consensus emerged that a comprehensive scientifically-based, data driven FRMS was a superior and feasible tool for effectively managing fatigue risk. API developed a standards document published in April 2010 as API/ANSI RP-755 that makes FRMS the operating standard for managing employee fatigue risk in the refining and petrochemical industry. The extended abstract reviews the considerations that went into developing the ANSI standard, issues that were resolved and progress and hurdles faced by the many petrochemical companies as they are now progressively implementing ANSI RP-755 as a continuously-improving FRMS process.